Remediation Courses for Doctors in the UAE

This page is for physicians licensed in any emirate who have been told that their care or conduct is being looked at, and who now need to show that they understand the concern and have done something about it. It covers general practitioners, specialists and consultants, in government hospitals and private clinics. You are in the right place if you have received any of the following:

• A notice from the Dubai Health Authority that a patient complaint has been registered, that a Medical Liability Committee will review your care, or that the Medical Practices Committee is considering a penalty.
• A Department of Health – Abu Dhabi letter about an Investigation Request for Medical Error, a committee report, or an administrative penalty.
• A MOHAP or Sharjah Health Authority notice about an administrative or medical complaint from a facility in Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, Ras Al Khaimah or Fujairah.
• A request from your medical director after an incident review, a clinical audit, an insurer query or a pattern of patient feedback.
• A decision with conditions: training within a set time, supervised practice, reassessment, or restricted privileges.

If you want ethics learning for renewal rather than remediation, the ethics and professionalism courses for doctors page is the better starting point.

The eight courses add up to 22 CPD hours. Here is what each one does for a physician, and which parts to read first if time is short.

Medical Ethics for Doctors in the UAE (3 hours). Eight teaching sections, of which three carry most physician complaints: section 3 on valid consent, capacity and discharge against advice; section 4 on confidentiality, health information exchanges and the third-party rule for examinations; and section 5 on certificates, sick leave, referral arrangements and honest advertising. Section 7 is the one to open if a family has disputed a decision not to resuscitate or a request around reproduction, and section 8 ends the course by tracing how an ethical lapse becomes a liability or disciplinary file.

Professional Standards for Physicians in the UAE (3 hours). Nine sections on the systems around your work rather than single decisions. Lesson 4.1 on licence title, specialty and clinical privileges is essential if the letter suggests you worked beyond what you were granted; lesson 2.2 explains how gaps in practice and an open file appear on your professional record; and section 8 sets out the two tracks, precautionary measures and penalties from the physician's side.

Facing a Licensing Investigation: The Core Remediation Course (4 hours). The longest course in the set and the only one with a 30-question final assessment. It opens with a checklist for the first 72 hours and the mistakes that make a case worse, maps the federal laws and each authority's process, and finishes with four worked UAE cases, among them a death after sedation in Dubai and an altered record in Sharjah. Take it first if you have never been through a committee process.

Medical Liability and Medical Error Under UAE Law (3 hours). The legal tests in detail: the Article 5 prohibited acts and their exceptions, what turns an error into a gross error, the no-liability grounds, the inside of a Medical Liability Committee, reconciliation, compulsory insurance and the deadlines across tracks. Section 8 turns that law into daily risk reduction, which is the part a committee is most interested in seeing you apply.

Insight: Understanding and Showing It After a Concern (2 hours). A five-step method for working through your own case: reconstruct, compare, explain, understand the impact, change. Lesson 1.3 deals with showing insight without over-admitting, which matters for physicians whose statements may also reach a court, and section 7 prepares you for questions at an interview or hearing.

Reflective Practice and Written Reflections (2 hours). Reflective models from Gibbs and Kolb to critical lenses, then the difference between describing an event and analysing it. Section 5 compares weak and strong statements written after a concern, and section 6 covers how written reflection can be used in UAE processes and how to write honestly without drawing legal conclusions.

Building a Remediation Plan After a Concern (3 hours). How to rewrite a complaint or decision as one precise statement of what must change, find the root cause, and set objectives a supervisor can test. Section 7 is written for physicians returning after a suspension, after revocation or after a gap, where reassessment or limited privileges may apply.

Clinical Documentation and Record Keeping (2 hours). What a defensible entry contains, how to make a legitimate late entry or correction, and the risks of templates, carried-forward text and dictation tools. Section 6 is devoted to medical reports, certificates and sick leave, and section 7 shows who reads your notes when something goes wrong.

The UAE does not run a single fitness to practise hearing. A concern about a physician can travel along separate tracks at the same time, and each asks a different question.

The tracks run separately. Under Article 38 of the Medical Liability Decree-Law a criminal case leaves disciplinary liability untouched, and Article 24 of Dubai's Resolution No. 49 of 2024 lets the DHA impose administrative penalties even after a court acquits you or a committee finds no liability. Write every account, for every track, from the same facts.

A complaint is normally handled by the authority that licensed the facility where the care took place.

Federal government hospitals run by Emirates Health Services sit outside the emirate rules; there the Executive Regulations point staff discipline to the federal human resources law. If you are unsure which body opened the file, ask in writing before you reply. The authority pages for Dubai, Abu Dhabi, the Northern Emirates and Sharjah follow each process in detail.

Physicians and dentists share a federal penalty scale. Under Article 28 of Federal Law No. 5 of 2019 the scale runs from a written notice and a written warning, through a fine between AED 1,000 and AED 1,000,000 and suspension for up to a year, to revocation of the licence. You must be heard, and allowed to put your defence, before any of them is imposed. A grievance goes to the complaints committee at the health authority within 15 days (Article 29).

• Dubai: the Medical Practices Committee can issue a written warning, downgrade, suspend for up to one year, revoke or fine AED 2,000 to 100,000, and can also require you to finish named training by a deadline, practise under supervision for as long as a year and be reassessed (Resolution No. 49 of 2024, Article 19). Penalties need not be applied in sequence.
• Abu Dhabi: Law No. 10 of 2018 allows notice, warning, supervision, suspension or cancellation of the licence, and administrative fines.
• After suspension: where a suspension lasted between three and twelve months, Article 7.2 of Cabinet Resolution No. 67 of 2020 lets the authority reassess your competence before you return, or limit your privileges or practice.
• After revocation in Dubai: reissue can be considered only two years after the decision, at the same title and not higher.

Precautionary suspension is separate from any finding: up to 30 days at a time, renewable, under federal law, and up to three months, extendable once, in Dubai. Check your licence expiry the day it starts.

Whoever reads your statement, a Medical Liability Committee member, a medical director or a licensing officer, is testing three things: whether you can see the problem without being told, whether you understand why it happened in your own practice rather than in medicine generally, and whether the change you describe would protect the next patient on a different day. A strong physician's statement answers all three in about a page, in the first person, with the medical file as its spine.

An illustrative excerpt

This example is invented for illustration and describes no real patient or doctor. A consultant physician in a Dubai hospital, whose patient's raised potassium result was not acted on for a day, might write:

The excerpt takes its times from the record, places the gap in the doctor's own routine, describes the effect in the patient's terms and offers changes that someone else can check. It avoids the words "error", "negligent" and "gross", which are for the committee to use, not the doctor.

Common mistakes in physicians' statements

• The literature review. Two paragraphs on guidelines show that you can read, not that you have changed.
• The hidden "but". "I accept the result was missed, but the system..." cancels the first half of the sentence. Give system factors their own paragraph, after your own part.
• Seniority as an answer. Years of experience explain why you were trusted with the decision, not why it went the way it did.
• Legal labels. Calling your own act negligent, or a complication an error, concedes a finding that belongs to someone else.
• A change nobody can see. "I will be more vigilant" cannot be audited. Name the step, the record it leaves and the person who checks it.

Physicians often send certificates on their own. A committee or medical director learns more from a short, ordered bundle:

• Your factual response, consistent with the medical file, reviewed by your insurer or lawyer.
• A dated learning record: each certificate shows the course title, CPD hours and completion date, and sits beside its reflective account.
• Evidence of changed practice: a revised consent template, a chaperone log, a re-audit of your own notes, a controlled-medicine prescribing review, or a new certificate protocol.
• Third-party feedback: a note from your head of department, medical director or supervising consultant, or an audit someone else carried out.
• A plan for the next six to twelve months, with who checks each step.

If training has been ordered, follow the decision exactly and ask the authority in writing before relying on any course in its place. Your licensing authority decides how any learning counts towards your CPD or a requirement it has set.

Physicians usually have more control over timing than they fear and less than they hope. The plan below spreads the eight core courses over four weeks, an average of five to six hours of study a week around clinics or theatre lists. If a decision has already ordered training by a date, or a committee report has arrived and its 30-day grievance period has started, those dates come first and the plan bends around them.

Two checks belong in week 4 whatever the case: your licence expiry date, and how far you are through the CPD target for the current licence year. Arriving at a hearing with a lapsed licence or an unexplained CPD shortfall creates a second problem while you are trying to solve the first.

Prices are set by CPD hours: two-hour courses are AED 239, three-hour courses AED 289 and the four-hour core course AED 329. A bulk discount applies in the cart: AED 120 off three or more courses, AED 180 off five or more and AED 300 off ten or more.

Every course is online and self-paced on any device, with 12 months' access, knowledge checks, UAE case studies, a 20-question scenario-based final assessment (30 questions in the 4-hour core investigation course) (80% to pass, 16 of 20), a certificate of completion and a structured reflective account.

Remediation and licence renewal answer different questions. A committee asks what you learned and changed; renewal asks whether you met your authority's CPD rule. The DHA asks physicians for 40 CPD points a year of licence, at least 70% in the specialty; the DOH asks for 80 credits per two-year licence, at least half from formal activity; MOHAP asks for CME in your own specialty. A DHA licence cannot be renewed without the required CPD, and a suspended DOH licence cannot be renewed at all, so plan early if a case is open.

Your licensing authority decides how any learning counts towards your CPD or a requirement it has set. Each certificate states the CPD hours, ready for your portfolio. Never describe a certificate as something it is not when you upload it: the DHA Manual warns that fraudulent CPD claims lead to disciplinary action.

Begin with Medical Ethics for Doctors and Professional Standards for Physicians, add the core course if the process is new to you, then choose the courses that match your letter.